Episode Thirty-Seven: Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights, Part II

In Part II of my interview with Professor Dylan C. Penningroth, author of Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights, we will discuss the three categories of rights as they were understood in the 1860's; how and why access to the law of everyday life was so important in the lives of former slaves; the little-understood phenomenon of the rise in Black property ownership in the South after the Civil War; the surprising relationship of African Americans and local courts in the South: how activists of the modern civil rights movement bequeathed to historians three flawed assumptions and much more.